Exponentially Improve Your Social Media through Authentically Social Content

Neal Schaffer: 0:01

authentically social content, what is it, why it's important and how you can easily begin to implement it to see exponentially better results in your social media marketing. I'm going to talk all about it in this next episode of The your digital marketing coach, podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody. Happy week to you. This is Neal Schaffer. I am your digital marketing coach, and welcome to my podcast. If you are new here, I have a podcast that is related to everything digital content, influencer, social media marketing, I cover a wide range of topics, because you don't just need to know how to do one thing. These days, you need to know how to do a variety of things to empower your business with the power of digital marketing. Half of these episodes are solo. It's me jiving, because I have a lot of clients, I have a mastermind community, I am networking, and I am dealing with and trying to help a lot of companies with their various aspects of digital marketing. And thus, this podcast provides me a vehicle to provide that advice to all of you as well. Half of the other episodes are interviews where I invite on a lot of experts, experts that I want to interview experts that inspire me. And that's how I know they're going to inspire you as well. So if you're new here, I hope you hit that subscribe button. If you've been here a while and you haven't reviewed this podcast, please take five seconds to even just giving it a five star rating on Apple or Spotify can really do a lot and expose this and ultimately help more people. All right. That's my spiel for the day done with that. I am actually recording this the day before I am going to the generative AI conference. This is the first conference that is devoted to artificial intelligence, I'd say in business in more so marketing, the developers of Jasper which is my dedicated AI tool. Yes, they were there before chat GPT. And yes, they also are able to tap into the chat GPD chat GPT API, but they offer a service and it's very, very targeted towards marketing and business. my affiliate link is Neal schaffer.com/jasper. Hope you'll check them out. I've been using them probably for close to a year now. And you can do some pretty incredible things. And I think if you are in marketing, or if you're a business that uses various software, you're starting to get bombarded with all sorts of tools now that are beginning to tap into AI, like chat, TPT, or Jasper to give you an easier way of developing content. I recently had a tool reach out to me say hey, we now offer a way to automate video scripts. So you can use this tool to create your YouTube videos, your tic tock videos because it shows you it's like a teleprompter. It'll show you the script on the screen as you speak. But now it can help us and automatically generate what that script is going to be based on what you want to talk about. I've seen my friends at tailwind go to Neal schaffer.com/tailwind. They have taken the approach of they are a social media dashboard. And if you want to use AI to write your descriptions for your Pinterest pins or your social media posts, you can use their AI copywriter as well. We are only at the beginning of what is possible. Now what is possible. What can we do? What should we do is going to be another topic for another episode. So I was originally going to publish this on my feedback from that conference that I'm attending tomorrow, you're gonna have to wait another two weeks for that. But it's another reason that keep subscribed, keep tuned in because I want to make sure I am at the forefront of what is going on to be able to help you as well. But clearly, as I mentioned in previous episodes, you need to be experimenting with it. You need to understand what is possible with it and therefore where you can plug it into what processes of your business. Now, this is sort of related to what I'm going to talk about today. Automation through AI is some thing that a lot of people in social media marketing have been doing for a long time, just today, you know, some automated Instagram DM tool reaches out to me. And clearly, the automated approach and social media marketing might have worked at one time. It just doesn't work anymore. We have matured as an audience that uses social media, we use it differently. And we understand what is the intent of someone when they reach out to us or when they post something on a specific topic. Now, I've talked before, and hopefully, if you haven't listened to my previous episodes, you should, because I've talked before how social media, in terms of bringing people back to your website is a diminishing game. Right? Every year, I get less and less a percentage of my traffic that comes from social media, some networks definitely less and less traffic. And it was recently where I started to really connect the dots. So recently, I would have said, social media is a place to develop relationships, it still is right? It is a place to develop relationships, and engage with people and find your fans, find your customers, find your partners, whatever it is that that is the place that is the social place, it is an amazing place to build brand awareness, through conversations, it is not a great place to build traffic to your websites, unless you're going to pay for the privilege. Now, I have always developed the most traffic from social media, from Twitter. But it's really interesting as the last nine months, I made the decision, I'm not going to use social media tools. To help me manage my conversations, my inbox, I want to go directly into the direct messages directly into the notifications on each of these platforms, and really treat each of them as their own authentic entity. And when you do this, you begin to see wow, I never got notified of these things in a certain social media tool, because they didn't have complete access to API's, or maybe they did not, you know, implement that in their tool. But being raw on the networks, obviously allows you to better understand them. And although I continue to get my most traffic from Twitter, it's really Twitter where I began to see in the heydays of NF t this is like a year ago now, on every platform, you always have fake engagement. So we do not know how real any of this is. But I've seen a new generation of people that have begun to do really well on Twitter from visible public engagement from their content. And guess what the content is not video content, the content is not linking them outside the content is keeping them on the platform. And if we think about this emergence of reels of tick tock of even Pinterest idea pins. And we understand that declining reach on these platforms also means that they are devaluing the presence of these link related posts, and giving more value to those that want to keep people on the platform. Right? That to me, is authentic social, it's using social media the way that it was intended to be used, which is also the way that keeps people on the platforms. It's like the early days of Twitter, we had tweet chats, we don't want to bring people off the platform, we wanted to stay on and tweet with people. LinkedIn used to have its own answers forum. LinkedIn groups used to be a more engaging place, Facebook, Facebook groups. On the one hand, you have the video, right, you have the short form video, which keeps people on which is as authentic as it gets. On the other hand, there is also authentic text based content, which is just there to generate conversations, and really to deliver value to an audience. It is not based on a link it just like I would recommend you create a short form video that teaches one thing. This short form content that is truly authentic is based around providing value around one idea, like a micro blog post. So now we get into talking about things like Twitter threads, or LinkedIn carousel posts. And you begin to see, oh, well, let me tell you what I did. This isn't going to be an easier way to explain this. As you know, I don't talk off a script in this podcast, it just, I think I would sound like a robot. So I have come to this realization. Now I'm going to give you and I'll put the links in the show notes. As you know, I am also an avid podcast listener, and there is about 10. There are about 10 different podcasts that I subscribe to. And I'm constantly trying to stay up to date. I'm now up to date on eight of them. So I'm rocking it recently right spent a lot of time in the car. So there were two Whew, that really impacted my thought process, which actually helped me to accelerate connecting the dots, and therefore be able to talk about this today, like I'm talking to you in the past, right? I realized, like with Twitter, I need and with LinkedIn, and Facebook, it can't just be titled blog posts link, it's the easiest way to do it. But it just gets lesser and lesser engagement. So starting about three months ago, I've started to be more conversational in the content that I publish on social media that has a link of trying to make it conversational. So the link is, yes, it's, it's still there. But I'm giving a little bit more background into why I wrote that post, or a little bit more background of what that post is about. So I'm not click baiting, you get a little bit more depth. And then you can decide whether you want to go on to the post, or maybe generate a conversation in that social media platform. Now, that was not authentic enough, because at the end of the day, I was still aiming for that link, click. Right. And recently, I have found out about tools. This is one tool that I talked about, in my marketing technology stack episode just a few episodes ago, a tool called content in. And this tool, basically, using AI, of course, gives you ideas, to spark conversations through your LinkedIn posts, it is not based on links, it is based purely on ideas, and generating that sort of viral content that you often see on LinkedIn, which is like a selfie. And then, you know, here's my thought for the day, or I analyze, you know, I've worked with 25 companies this year. And these are the 10 things that are holding them back from success. You get into these, these long, LinkedIn posts that do really, really well in the platform. So whether it's Twitter threads, whether it's these LinkedIn posts, there's a commonality here that I am seeing. And it is a different type of content that perhaps younger people with a fresher look at content and these platforms, has found a way, being authentic and their content to really generate some pretty massive engagement. So I said to myself, Okay, and I'm going to talk about this podcast episodes in a moment. But I said, I want to give you the results of my own very, very early experiment, but it is very, very promising. So Twitter, as you know, or maybe you don't know, when the Elan must take over, he has started displaying how many impressions, every tweet gets, okay, not just your own tweets, you can go to anyone's Twitter profile, no matter how many followers they have, and see how many impressions each tweet gets. So this has been really eye opening, because now I can also see what other people are getting. And you might, I don't know, I think it's pretty hard to buy impressions, because it's the side by the algorithm. So I think at the end of the day, Elon is trying to make it all more transparent. If you see something that has 1000 likes, but only like 50 impressions, then something's wrong. They're right, or maybe 1000 impressions and 1000 likes, something's still wrong there. So I have found that even though my traffic is going up, man, I gotta find a way to get more impressions for my tweets, right. And I've noticed that the numbers are basically in the hundreds per tweet. So I've tried to reduce the number of tweets, I've tried to obviously get more conversational, et cetera, et cetera. And then I said, You know what, I'm going to create a thread, like a legit thread, using this concept of authentic social where I just want to keep people on the platform, and I just want to offer value, right? So instead of thinking, I am going to publish X links per day in tweets or one link a day on LinkedIn for my blog. Now it's like, okay, I want to start to do with throughout a week in place of a blog post, or two threads a week, in place of other content, because you can only publish so much content, right. And the less you publish, actually, the better performance of the algorithm. The algorithm has fewer pieces of content to choose from. So my first experiment happened literally last Friday, three days ago. And I mentioned AI at the beginning. So I used Jasper, right? To help me create this thread. And the thread basically was an I say thread and I'm reading your tweet, I'll link to the tweet in the show notes as well. I asked my favorite AI tool josper And I have my you know, affiliate link in the parentheses after that this was not done for affiliate marketing purpose. But I want to make it easy for you to find it. So anyway. And I basically in the chat tool that has teach me 10 ways I can use chat GPT in marketing. And then here's the advice. So I gave the answer that the AI gave in quotes, like number one, generate targeted and relevant content for social media posts, blog posts, emails and other marketing materials. And then I added my own commentary. Yes, the fact that I created this thread using the eye shows its potential for content creation. And then I added number two. Now they're out of order, because I've gotten different engagement number to automatically generate keyword rich pieces of content that are tailor made for SEO optimization. And then I said, there are many ways to use AI like Cha GPT. But asking it the right content in certain ways is something you can do how well they will be optimized for SEO is a question. You know, I'll give you another tip number 10, use natural language processing tools integrated into the platform to create powerful sales copy that speaks directly to customers needs in an authentic way. And I said, you know, having chats up to 100%, in charge of your customer facing sales copy, I don't think we're there yet. So this was not based on a blog post, this is generating a conversation, this is providing value, providing my own opinion, while also sort of, you know, educating people on my views of AI and what is possible with it. And at the very end, I could have added a link to a blog post or a podcast episode in the subject, I'll probably be the best way to do it. I just said, Hey, in this thread, I've tried to give a balanced opinion of the potential for GPT and AI, but also a realistic look at the impact that technology might or might have on marketing. What do you think, agree, disagree, we'd love to hear your opinion. Now, this thread way, outperformed anything that I had done before then in the last several days, by x times, I'd say, I probably got five times more impressions and a lot more, you know, comments and, and retweets and likes than any of my previous content before that, you know, within a certain timeframe. But what's also interesting is, after I published that, I noticed, my next post also got a lot of impressions. So I'd say after that thread, maybe got, you know, 5x impressions, right, but then my next tweet got three times, then two times, then three and a half times, then two times, then two times, then two times and, and now I have raised the threshold. And this is sort of how the algorithms work, right? Once they give you a little bit more visibility for your content. And once you're able to cash in on that, by getting engagement, they're gonna reward you and give you an uptick on your other content. So I'm not saying completely stopped doing what you've been doing. But I'm saying by interjecting maybe starting once a week, which is sort of my plan of interjecting this type of content, I think you're going to be rewarded. And by the way, that the biggest reward is not just the algorithm, but you're developing a deeper and more authentic relationship with your followers, and your connections as well. Now going forward, I want to also mention, and once again, I am going to mention where I found this, but now I started this with the Twitter thread. So there is actually an automated tool, which from I have yet to use it but I'm about to use it to create my first LinkedIn carousel posts that will take Twitter threads and automatically generate a LinkedIn carousel, which I believe is a PDF that you scroll through. But apparently these have been doing really well in the LinkedIn algorithm as well. So it starts with an idea of offering value, maybe saying something in 10 points, you can repurpose blog posts, podcast episodes, this is also part of repurposing content. And speaking of repurposing content, you know, part of these podcast episodes that I mentioned helped me connect these dots. If you're interested in learning more about this one is content 10 next podcast, Amy woods, absolute thought leader in terms of repurposing content, and she recently had someone on her show, Amanda Natividad, now Amanda and I did a webinar together some time ago about a tool that she works for called spark Toro hopefully you were on that webinar if you weren't you should definitely check out spark to our Amanda is one of the smartest people that I know in all honesty, just incredibly smart about content creation, former you know, food blogger, journalist, really, really intelligent. She calls this zero click Content. I want to have my own name for its I call it authentic social content, regardless, but it's the thought that you're not trying to get clicks from the content. Right now, if you listen to this podcast episode exploring zero click Content with Amanda and atividade. You'll learn that she uses it in a similar way, but also just to test ideas, right. And based on the engagement, she'll know if those ideas have legs. And from there, she's developed webinars from Twitter threads just by gauging interest that people have in different topics. Also, the other podcasts I want to talk about is the Smart Passive Income podcast with Pat Flynn. Now pat is very interesting. He's developed his own community. And he's done really well with that community and similar to how I have brought on people from my digital first mastermind He also has brought on people from his community to his podcast now I don't often I don't always listen to all of his episodes where he has people from this community talking, because they may not all be relevant or the reason why subscribe to his podcast, love the guy. But I think we're all getting very selected. Maybe my like my last episode was about tick tock. And if you had no interest whatsoever in tick tock, you might have skipped through it. That's fine. That's why I cover a variety of topics. But this one was really, really interesting. It was from a podcaster named Gillian tetes. Gillian specializes in a podcast of helping keep people sober, right? Not your typical, like marketing podcasts that I'm used to listening to. But she talked about how to use what she calls the Sneak Attack method. And it is a very, very similar approach. In fact, the tool that converts Twitter threads into LinkedIn, carousels is something I found out from her on that episode. It's called Tap Leo, by the way, tip, Lal. Don't think me think Gillian, and I'll put a link to this podcast episode in the show notes as well. But she talks about the Sneak Attack method, it's sort of the same thing, right? She came to the realization in a very, very different way, which is I put an audiogram of my podcast up, I didn't get any engagement. What am I doing? And actually, the less you promote what you're doing, the more engagement you get. And then she jumps into this concept of LinkedIn carousels. She looks at it more from the LinkedIn and Twitter perspective. And then hey, at the very end, yeah, you know, for more info, if you want to read about this more in depth, go to this blog post, yes, at the very or listen to this podcast episode, which, which is what she's talking about. But and so she calls that the sneak attack, you're sort of at the very end. You're, you're coming in with that sneak attack? Yes, it is promotional, but it's not overtly promotional. And it does not seem like the intent of that post is Promotional. In other words, it is authentically social, maybe are called authentically social. Instead of authentic social, what do you think, Okay, I'm still coming up with names for these things. But you can see, and this is why I love love, love listening to podcasts, I know you do as well, because you are able to get this really, really raw information from experienced professionals that you can input immediately into your business. So if you buy into this, take one day a week, maybe it's Fridays, whatever it is, just spend five or 10 minutes to repurpose content you already have. If you can break something down into five or 10 ideas. Create a Twitter thread, use top Leo, to create a LinkedIn carousel post, don't post anything else that day, right, turn off your your scheduler right? And let me know what the results are. I really think you're gonna see the same results that I'm seeing now. I hope this has given you something to think about. I've been talking frequently the last several months about reimagining our social media, that we can no longer get any traffic from it. The emergence of short form video, this is a another piece of that puzzle, but it's technically based. And if you can't buy in a short form video, I think this is something that you can buy into, you can create a system a process and start to insert more authentically social content into your feed. And I think you will reap the benefits from doing that. Well, that wraps it up for another episode. Like I said, two weeks from today be on the lookout for my report from the generative AI conference. I'm literally flying up to San Francisco, just to attend this conference. from Southern California. It is sold out. I have already had people reach out to me asking for interviews, you know, what am I going to think about it, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm generally really, really excited and can't wait to share that information with you. But until then, I hope that you'll remain a subscriber and if you haven't subscribed, hopefully this convinced you to hit that subscribe button. And we'll see in the next episode. This is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. 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